Traditionally, when two software systems communicate, the systems first need to develop some kind of standard format into which both systems convert their data before transferring a batch of data/records to each other and the data/records can then be loaded into the partner's database. It can be time-consuming to reach an agreement on a data or record format, to write a data conversion interface, and even costly to develop the communication interfaces between the software systems. To implement similar projects with all business partners is nearly impossible. Therefore, most business transactions are still relying on paper-related technology. Electronic data interchange (EDI) has been used to conduct business electronically; however, it is only a point-to-point communication and the cost to implement EDI is high. A value added network (VAN) on the other hand allows multiple business partners to transfer data electronically, although a VAN only provides a vehicle to transfer bulk data and it is a type of batch process of business data.
Recently, e-commerce is emerging, and there are different ideas of creating enterprise solutions to emphasize integration and collaboration on enterprise data exchanges. A highly scalable and integrated architecture and infrastructure are needed to support business partner communization, collaborative business activity interaction and automation, and collaborative business intelligence at the scales of both enterprises and global business communities.
The practice of the basic service oriented architecture (SOA) is implemented in the data and the procedure invocation or web service levels, however, the received data still needs to undergo record format transformation or mapping at the receiving site. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) could be implemented as a distributed bus with structured centralized hub-and-spoke architecture; however, without a well-integrated architecture between business partners, the collaborative interaction of business activities or web service invocations are the Product of Cartesian of the total business partners or collaborators involved. It complicates performance and security concerns in a collaborative e-business environment. To achieve the scopes of both enterprise and global service infrastructure, for example, Global Service Bus or GSB, architecture is needed to integrate and communize business partners, as is an infrastructure with built-in business intelligence to eliminate or reduce the direct interaction between communized business partners or between collaborators.
With current published methods for collaborative e-commerce, many discussions involve the ways of effectively exchanging data between business partners. Intents should be incorporated into business data to enliven the collaborative transaction and give the transaction more semantics for business partners to understand the intentions and increase operational productivity. Therefore, it is important for a collaborative infrastructure to support collaborative e-commerce interoperation with intents or accents, and the collaborative business activity flow automation can be more robust.
With current practices and published methods, a collaborative system supports either point-to-point or broadcasting delivery. A robust collaborative infrastructure supporting both point-to-point and broadcasting delivery is needed. The broadcasting capability should have the flexibility of specifying by members, member groups or by scopes of communities or community groups, either the upstream parent groups or the downstream descendant groups.
There are several currently known methods that focus on the implementation of hubs for use with a collaboration system for handling messages of conversations between members. However, these methods are lacking a robust infrastructure and architecture for central control and do not include an enhanced family tree hierarchy with root heads for connecting foreign-clustered communities or parent nodes to connect domestic communities with the same cluster and alien nodes to connect heterogeneous clouds. Clouds are communities that are not controlled by nor conform to the same implemented architecture. The present methods also lack a definition of the architecture or framework for communizing or grouping related business partners. Therefore, with the present methods, the user is not given a method for managing or controlling a community of business partners. Furthermore, these methods only provide local routing because a hub can only view its connected hubs.
One of the important factors that will make collaborative e-commerce prevail is that the collaborative commerce items and on-demand service offered by the communities can be swiftly identified through a search engine and the result rendered in a commerce-ready format by which users conduct business activities directly. With today's search engines, there are multiple steps taken and websites visited, before arriving at a page where business activity can be conducted, and the result of each transaction is discrete; there are no correlations between business activities conducted on different sites. A robust, integrated and collaborative framework with global address schemes is needed to streamline the collaborative process from commerce search to the completion of transactions in a coordinated systematic way
Another important factor needed for successful collaborative e-commerce is a well-controlled resource management system. In a collaborative computing environment, reusability of resources is extremely important to reduce duplicated work and increase accuracy and efficiency, especially on the collaborative business data and format mapping efforts. Once the data or mapping profiles have been created, the same data should be used for the transformation of the data between business partners for the complete course of the business activity cycle, and the mapping profiles should be shared by the whole community using the same format. Further, collaborative business data should be utilized for the purpose of providing business intelligence at the local, regional and global levels to help business partners analyze the health of their business. A robust integrated and collaborative framework is needed to achieve these goals.
The address scheme used in today's internet world is basically sufficient for the usage of single domain. We need to have an address scheme that can provide ways of constructing cross-domain addresses for the needs of global ecommerce, global on-demand service provisioning, and global Service Oriented Architecture, which makes inter-domain communication possible
A currently known method for both Real Application Cluster and Federated Server clustering of Application servers or database servers suggests using a group of application servers or database servers as a cluster. There is no specific structure by which the clustered servers should be arranged to achieve a higher efficiency and performance. There is basically a one level structure where loads are shared between the servers. There is a need for a highly efficient integrated and collaborative framework structures to arrange clustered servers.
In a Storage Area Network, the number of disks in the Disk Array Enclosure (DAE) is limited by the capacity of Disk Processor Enclosure (DPE) can support. As the needs for storage increases, more DPE and DAE are put into the fabric network. As the number of DPE increases, so as the complexity and the overhead. There are needs for a highly efficient integrated and collaborative framework structures that are well fitted to provide clustered DPEs with central controls and make Logical Unit Number (LUN) spindles created across DAEs possible, and to gain the collaborated processing power of the clustered DPEs and memory caches.
As online gaming and cyber gaming tournaments grow in popularity, there is a need for highly efficient integrated and collaborative framework structures that provide structures for online gaming hosts to collaborate together and form a more robust gaming playground.
As national and local electronic voting is adopted, there is a need for highly efficient integrated and collaborative framework structures with centrally controlled and distributed management and operation.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for improved techniques for providing a robust integrated and collaborative framework supporting both point-to-point and broadcasting delivery of business data and services in a global collaborated computing environment.
Unless otherwise indicated illustrations in the figures are not necessarily drawn to scale.